She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.

This is what he knew that Paul didn't: the world was precarious and sometimes cruel. He'd had to fight hard to achieve what Paul simply took for granted.

Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.

Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.

I love to swim, and I love being near water.

Its impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.

...bleak territory of the heart.